“THE BIG SHORT”: Betting against the house

But what if in rooting for the little guy we’re also advocating our own destruction?

In Adam McKay’s “The Big Short” a handful of high-finance outsiders and weirdos smell something fishy in the pre-2008 sub prime housing market. They decide to beat the corrupt financial establishment at its own game.

Viewers of McKay’s ‘s grimly amusing comedy (he’s best known for lightweight Will Ferrell vehicles) will find themselves in a dilemma. For the story’s heroes to emerge triumphant the American and world economies will have to tank. Millions will lose their homes, their savings and their jobs.

But, hey, that’s capitalism. Somebody always wins. Somebody always loses. And making money off the other guy’s misery is the American way.

The screenplay by McKay and Charles Randolph (adapting Michael Lewis nonfiction best seller The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine) begins in 2005 with Michael Burry (Christian Bale), the oddball manager of a California-based hedge fund. Possessor of a medical degree and virtually no people skills, Burry prefers to hold his conversations with numbers.

Christian Bale

Burry pads around the office barefoot and in cutoffs and has one glass eye — but he sees enough to recognize that the sub-prime housing market is destined to collapse. Banks have been giving home loans to people who shouldn’t qualify and are destined to default; those bad loans are then bundled and resold, building “worth” where there is no value.

So Burry offers the big Wall Street firms a deal they can’t refuse. He has them create for him a financial instrument — the credit default swap — that will pay off only if the market collapses. The heavy players are only too happy to oblige…they can’t imagine the bubble bursting.

Burry is considered a madman by most, but to a handful of fund managers he makes real sense. One is Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), who is as slick and gung ho as Burry is dweebish (think Matthew McConaughey in “The Wolf of Wall Street” ). But numbers don’t lie and Vennett gets on board.

Steve Carell

Also jumping on the bandwagon are Charles Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), youngsters who operate their own “garage band hedge fund” and have an ally and adviser in Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), a former high-powered banker how living a hippy-dippy lifestyle as a dog walker.

These folks are in it for the money. But for Mark Baum (Steve Carell), yet another hedge fund manager, it’s personal. Baum is a moralist and Quixotic crusader, a guy deeply offended by the arrogance and stupidity of the people at the top of the financial food chain. To him it’s not just about making a killing; it’s about exposing the big boys for the unprincipled greedheads they are.

(Yeah, Baum is seriously conflicted, which may explain his neurotic personality. But then this entire movie is seriously conflicted.)

Now Wall Street shenanigans might not seem like the most dramatic subject for a film, but McKay’s often explosive and goofily off-the-wall directing style revs up the material. Aware that most of us don’t know a hedge fund from our own asses, he gives us celebrity tutorials.

With the exception of Carell’s high-strung man of conscience, none of these characters are fully developed (and with the exception of Burry, most are fictional composites of real people). Curiously, this doesn’t hurt the film because McKay has found such a diverting delivery system, presenting the material as a heavily-caffeinated financial minstrel show in which the wise men blather on while the walls fall around them.